Re: 2.4 vm, program load, page faulting, ...

Rik van Riel
2003-03-17T14:51:33Z

On Sat, 15 Mar 2003, Paul Albrecht wrote:

> ... Why does the kernel page fault on text pages, present in the page
> cache, when a program starts? Couldn't the pte's for text present in the
> page cache be resolved when they're mapped to memory?

The mmap() syscall only sets up the VMA info, it doesn't
fill in the page tables. That only happens when the process
page faults.

Note that filling in a bunch of page table entries mapping
already present pagecache pages at exec() time might be a
good idea. It's just that nobody has gotten around to that
yet...